James M. O’Neil reports for The Record:
At the dining halls on the Rutgers University campus, there are no trays. Instead, students carry their food to the table with their hands.
It is one way the university decided to tackle food waste, and it ended up saving money, too.
With trays, students tended to pile on multiple plates of food and pour several glasses of milk just so they wouldn’t have to get up again for seconds.
“But you can only eat so much, and they would routinely put more on their tray than they could consume,” said Joe Charette, the executive director of Rutgers Dining Services.
At first, some students grumbled about the trayless policy, but within a few weeks that stopped, Charette said. And the savings were significant.
In the first 10 weeks, Rutgers saved $300,000 in food costs and, depending on the meal, saw a 14 to 22 percent reduction in what students tossed after they ate.
Rutgers’ four main dining halls each serve 7,000 meals a day. The system as a whole serves 35,000 meals a day, or 6.5 million a year. Overall, going trayless saves Rutgers about $30,000 a week, Charette said.
Rutgers is among a growing number of universities that have gone trayless, including the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. and Williams College in Williamstown, Mass.
Charette said he is in favor of New Jersey’s goal to cut food waste in half by 2030, but is concerned about how that will be measured.
“We’ve already been reducing food waste and refining it — are we supposed to reduce it by 50 percent on top of that?” he said. “Versus someone who’s never done it and there’s a lot they can do right off the bat? It will be important to see how the state rolls out this plan with measurable numbers and how they can apply it fairly.”
Rutgers has a long history of trying to reduce the amount of food waste that ends up in landfills.
Steve Pinter, who operates Pinter Beef and Pork Farm in Hillsborough, visits Rutgers six days a week to pick up 55-gallon barrels filled with food leftovers, which he feeds to his hogs.
The Somat grinds up food leftover food and drops into green barrels. The barrels are then sent to Pinter Farm to feed the livestock, as opposed to the food ending up in a landfill. Busch Dining Hall at Rutgers in Piscataway on Wednesday July 18, 2018. (Photo: Anne-Marie Caruso/NorthJersey)
When students return their plates after a meal, Rutgers cafeteria workers scrape the leftovers into a long trough filled with water. The water carries the food waste to a machine with an auger, which grinds it up and squeezes out the water, reducing the volume by 80 percent. The result, a pinkish byproduct with the consistency of ground beef, goes into the barrels, which are stored in a walk-in refrigerator to await Pinter’s next visit to campus.
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